Here’s the recording: 

22 October 2025 – Discretionary payments and member representation in defined benefit schemes – Oral evidence – Committees – UK Parliament

The WPC parliamentary announcement

It wasn’t just the BP Pensioners Group who were represented, we had a wide range of people giving evidence as representatives of groups who had lost increases to pensions earned before 1997, a lot of concern that surplus distribution from the Pension Schemes Bill , would not go to members, only to shareholders.

Jack Jones brilliant summation was that pensions depend on trustees, trust has been broken, pensions have been broken. Nick Reeves picks in Pension Extra quoted at the end of this blog.

Onto session two

Harus Rai, a technical specialist questioned what was called a surplus. Jon Forsyth – another technician argued that schemes have focused on security. We were getting a lot of sympathy for skint employers, having responsibility for less well pensioned DC savers. Maggie Rodger also argued for employers who had sympathy for employers who had had to pay deficit payments. More from the barrister Hywel Robinson saying that the law was not on the side of those who haven’t been getting increases  that Jack Jones had claimed had been promised, promises that had been accepted on trust.

It was a sad second session which argued that not paying promises to those in DB scheme could be justified by a fresh generation of staff were getting no more than DC savings paid at a lower rate. They were being ripped off even more.

Here are the three representatives of schemes with pre-97 indexation problems

TUC

Hewlett Packard

American Express

BP Actioner Group

Clear, honest and to the point , this was an extremely powerful section of the morning’s session.

Capital Cranfield

Temple Bright

SPP

AMNT

Technical , hard to understand and dry these four were unable to get beyond legalities. Empathy with the cases of those represented in the previous session was hard to find.

The men talked out the session , Maggie Rodger tried to argue for a balanced case where DB members weren’t getting a good deal but was talked over. It did not represent the professional pensions in a sympathetic like (IMO).

The third session

The event finished with Julian Lyne and Fiona Frobisher of the Pension Regulator, defending the Pension Regulator.

Julian and Fiona did not lose out nor did the public sector schemes they worked at nor bank BNY from where Julian has recently joined TPR as an executive.

The argument against giving the promised money, trusted to be given was that it was “too complex”.

Everything had to be weighed up and there are a lot of different schemes with differing problems and it really was beyond the trustees to make decisions as hard as to pay the promised money. TPR will be collecting data about the decision had or hadn’t been made. Julian Lyne talked of a partnership approach between sponsors and trustees, clearly this was too hard for him to consider. TPR could produce a framework.

This was a matter of legal and philosophical questions said Fiona Frobisher. A matter of covenant, decent funding and fiduciary duties. This will of course make things easy for the first panel to understand (not).

When encountered with the blatant unfairness of Pre 97 non-payment of increases, Lynes said he was interested in talking about discretionary payments. This was odd as the morning had been billed about pre-97 problems, this may have been down to him not knowing about them.

If I had been an MP on this WPC – I would have been surprised not to have got somewhere either with pre-97 nor use of surplus to pay discretionary increases.  There couldn’t have been a better defence of TPR’s progress.